On Friday, April 24, more than 50 attendees gathered to hear the keynote—and kick off a weekend of stimulating talks and discussion—for the 3rdCascadia Seminar, “Ethnographic Adventures in Medical Anthropology.” Taking place every two years, the Cascadia Seminar brings together a diverse group of medical anthropologists: scholars at all stages of their careers, from graduate students to postdocs …

Recently, the research community has been flooded with encouragement to make things “open,” meaning: freely and easily accessible, in a variety of ways, and to a great variety of audiences. This impetus to be open has taken the form of debates over “Open Source” software licensing, “Open Access” to the published results of research[i], …

Questions of health, medicine and science have long animated sub-disciplinary attentions in the social sciences and humanities. Recently, however, research around these topics has taken a marked collaborative turn. If topics in the medical and health sciences were once straightforward objects of study for anthropological, sociological or philosophical analysis, increasingly, to work ‘on’ such topics often means also to work …

Imagine a world where you can walk into a hospital, submit a urine and blood sample, and be told 20 minutes later that you not only have a particular type of ear infection, but also a 50% chance of developing diabetes in the next ten years. Such is the promise of “personalized medicine,” in which the development of molecular diagnostics …